(© ERIK MICHEL) 

Running with the Biotech Bulls

On a bright Tuesday morning in autumn, sunlight sparkles from the slow-turning rotors of the wind turbines that line the hills outside of Pamplona, Spain. As my plane lands on the runway, I realize that it’s the only one. We slow, make a 180-degree turn and taxi to the tiny terminal—one that will serve thousands of biotechnology experts on their way to BioSpain 2010.

I soon learn that Pamplona caters simultaneously to the past and the future. The city consists of a two-era donut, with modern buildings making up the ring and the centuries-old city lying in the hole.

That evening, a group of largely Spanish journalists and I ride a bus that creeps through the heart of Pamplona’s very narrow streets. After the bus negotiates about 15 minutes of tight turns, we stop in front of the Center for Applied Medical Research (CIMA), which was created by the University of Navarra. The university still provides 20 percent of CIMA’s funding, and a consortium of companies provides the rest. Jesús Hernández, CIMA’s chief operating officer, points out, “We’ve already spun off a biotech company, Digna Biotech.”

In 2009, Digna Biotech, headquartered in Pamplona, joined forces with Biotecnol in Portugal and Genentech (Roche) to develop and commercialize a cytokine—cardiotrophin-1—that treats inflammation, liver conditions, metabolic disorders and other indications.

After a tour of CIMA and a dinner of seemingly endless and incredibly delicious courses, Hernández and Juan Ruiz, medical director at Digna, take me on a midnight walk along the course where people run with the bulls. As Hernández and Ruiz describe how to run and survive—including don’t get up if you fall down and don’t drift to the outside of tight turns—I wonder what tips will help them prosper in international biotechnology.

An Expanding Exposition

As BioSpain opens on that following Wednesday at the Baluarte Conference Center, I chat near the front doors with José María Fernández Sousa-Faro, founder of PharmaMar and president of ASEBIO, the Spanish association of biocompanies. He tells me that BioSpain has “grown exponentially.” He calls it “the biggest biotechnology meeting in all of southern Europe.” Organizing it fell to ASEBIO and the government of Navarra, the region around Pamplona.

Beyond being big, BioSpain pushes biotechnology’s edge of innovation. Upon entering the vendor area, I start conversing with Daniel Robinson, senior application scientist at Schrödinger—a New York City company that creates software for computational drug design. With a few moves of a mouse, Robinson brings up a three-dimensional protein structure on a computer screen. “We start with the x-ray diffraction data for a protein,” Robinson explains, “and then refine the structure, including the position and orientation of water molecules, using the x-ray density and the force field.”

In many models, water molecules get ignored completely or placed only where a crystallographer thinks that they matter, and water matters. “A tightly bound water molecule can actually block a binding site. Other bound water molecules can be bridged or displaced by a ligand,” Robinson says.

Not far from the Schrödinger display, I come across a booth for the National Research Council Canada (NRCC), which seems far from home in northern Spain. As I soon learn, however, many countries make strong biotechnology connections with Spain. For example, Nezar Rghei, vice president of business development at Norgen Biotek in Thorold, Ontario, tells me that his company collaborates with Spanish companies for R&D and sales. Norgen makes sample-preparation kits that use silicon carbide–based chromatography. “The same platform is used for purifying DNA, RNA and proteins,” Rghei says.

To better understand the connection between Spain and Canada, Bill Dobson, director for the NRCC Ontario says, “Spain is a very interesting gate to Europe, and Canada is a gate to the U.S.” So this two-country interaction—Canada and Spain working together—sets the stage for other international partnerships.

Multiplying Results

Like all research, though, the ultimate goal should be results. When Carlos Cordón-Cardó of the Columbia University Medical Center—the first keynote speaker of the conference—takes the stage to talk about cancer stem cells, he brings home that very point. Immediately, he states his philosophy: “Important discoveries, findings in the laboratory need to have an impact in the community.”

Then, he begins to tell the audience about cancer. He asks: Is the seed of cancer an adult stem cell? If it is, this poses quite a challenge. Cordón-Cardó says that such cells are tough, hard to kill, resistant to toxins.

To support his theory of stem cell–driven cancer, he shows a movie of an undifferentiated stem cell from an epithelial tumor. As he watches this cell divide, he says, “Cancer is the product of cells we didn’t see before now.”

Consequently, treatments must attack the stem cells and their offspring, which might take multiple forms of therapy. As Cordón-Cardó explains, “We believe that single-minded approaches will not be effective.”

Spanish biotechnology experts should agree, because one of the country’s own drugs, Yondelis from PharmaMar, treats relapsed ovarian cancer. So one treatment is rarely enough for one disease.

In fact, most biotechnology challenges benefit from multipronged approaches. For example, Neuron BPh in Granada identified about 1,000 approved drugs that might protect people from neurodegenerative diseases. This provides an example of extending the value of existing knowledge.

The Next Big Things

In a session exploring the “next big thing” in biotechnology, Alan Paau—executive director and vice provost for technology transfer and economic development at Cornell University—takes a moment to consider the definition of biotechnology. He defines it as using something biological or modifying something biological.

That definition—suitably broad—makes room for many areas to fit into the next big things in the field. As a result, this discussion swirls from one topic to another.

In the same vein as Cordón-Cardó’s keynote, Paau points to stem cells. Paau expects research in this area to impact cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative diseases and oncology.

Pablo Ortiz, general director at Digna Biotech, brings up vaccines, saying that “few examples have contributed more to the human condition.” He adds that biotechnology research suffers from a lack of effective animal models.

Getting to those next big things, though, will surely require the convergence that Paau starts to describe. For one thing, he mentions the convergence of science and technology that produced two-photon microscopy. As another example, he talks about the zero-mode waveguides used at Pacific Biosciences to isolate DNA for sequencing.

Convergence and Cash

Such convergence appears in many talks about technological advances at BioSpain. For instance, Jaime García-Rupérez, of the Valencia Nanophotonics Technology Center at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, describes an optical sensor for identifying bacteria. He calls this technology a point-of-care device that can be used to detect bacteria, including sepsis.

This lab-on-a-chip approach—called InTopSens, for INTegrated Optical SENSor—could reduce the steps and expertise needed to identify bacteria in a sample. This project is managed by Daniel Hill at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, and includes a range of partners, among them, García-Rupérez. Rather than performing many steps in the lab, García-Rupérez says that a technician could put a sample in InTopSens and get the result.

As this advance and many others at BioSpain reveal, it takes time and funding to move forward. Many indications, however, show that Spain is ready to make the investment. For one thing, the government of Navarra created a fund of €500 million to invest in biotechnology. As Fernández Sousa-Faro says at a press conference at BioSpain, such investments are “crucial in order to prevent our best researchers from moving abroad.”

Other areas of Spain also see the value of building a biotechnology community. (See “Companies Climbing in Catalonia.”)

Bulls or Biotech

As I wait for my flight home, I think back on wandering through Pamplona’s streets with Jesús Hernández of CIMA. “Maybe Pamplona will be known one day for biotech more than running with the bulls,” I had said to him.

He smiled, thought for a moment—as if he hoped that such a thing could be true—but then he shook his head and said, “No, it will always be about the bulls. It is the culture here. But we are trying hard.”

Perhaps so, but I suspect that Jesús Hernández and other leaders of Spanish biotechnology know how to run with the bulls of biotechnology and not get gored.

Companies Climbing in Catalonia

Catalonia lies at Spain’s eastern border, with the Mediterranean to the south and the Pyrenees to the north. This region is home to 21 percent of Spain’s biotechnology companies, most of them headquartered in Barcelona. According to Biocat—Catalonia’s biotechnology and biomedicine cluster organization—the number of biotechnology firms in the area grew by 15–30 percent in each of the past five years.

According to Montserrat Vendrell, Biocat’s CEO, “We have all the elements to get excellent results both in basic and clinical research, as well as in the development of new products to market.” She adds, “With more than 350 biopharma companies, 13 hospitals with noteworthy research activity, 60 research centers, 13 science parks and some large research infrastructures, the bioregion of Catalonia is one of the most outstanding bioclusters in Europe.”